The doctor offered pills. ‘To help you sleep, so you can stay strong,’ he said. He had such a kindly face that I felt like asking for a hug instead. Pa said we should take the pills, but I wasn’t so certain. What if they left us so comatose that we couldn’t wake up when Jimmy arrived back, or we received news that he needed our help? I pretended to agree to take them, just to reassure Pa and Mrs D.

Pa retired early and his bedroom door remained shut – he must have taken the pills. But I stayed awake, slipping silently downstairs from time to time making more cups of tea or, sometimes, cocoa, and eating nearly a whole tin of biscuits. I wandered listlessly around the house and even went out into the garden. Wading through the cold, wet grass in bare feet offered a temporary distraction.

A fox screeched somewhere in the woods beyond, sounding so much like a child in distress that it was all I could do to stop myself calling out Jimmy’s name. An owl flew past me at the height of my face, just a few yards away: a silent, ghostly white shape that disappeared into the darkness as fast as it had appeared.

After that I went back to bed, my mind churning, ranging through every eventuality, from the perfectly probable through to the completely unimaginable. If Jimmy had been hiding somewhere, he would have come home when he got hungry. He was always hungry. Or perhaps he’d been locked in a shed by mistake? But they’d searched all the sheds in the village. Twice. Perhaps he was hurt and unable to move? But they’d searched the woods and fields in a three-mile radius, they told us.

What if he had, as the police thought, gone out in the boat? It was very unlikely, but still a possibility. He couldn’t swim, so if he capsized and panicked, he might have drowned. I couldn’t help thinking about Melissa Blackman’s crocodile and those disappearing legs. But in my saner moments I reminded myself that dragons are only found in fairy stories, and crocodiles exist only in zoos and in Africa.

Thinking about the river terrified me. I’d seen what the storm had done, turning a placid, friendly stream into a hungry, raging torrent that crashed through the meadows, bursting its banks and uprooting ancient trees. But Jimmy and I had never visited the river. It was a good quarter of a mile beyond the lake, or over the grassy hill. I couldn’t imagine why he might have gone there on his own, on such a fiercely stormy night. If he’d fallen in, he would have been washed away in an instant.